BELGRADE, Sept 7 (AFP) - A Russian deputy has refused to testify in the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic in protest at the UN court's decision to impose a lawyer on the former Yugoloslav leader, the Beta news agency reported on Tuesday.
"The court made an illegal decision by imposing lawyers upon Milosevic," Nikolai Ryjkov, who was due to appear as a witness at the UN tribunal in The Hague on September 13, said in a statement sent to the Serbian agency.
A member of Russia's upper house of parliament, Ryjkov charged that the court had acted "in breach of international law and of its own statutes".
The former Yugoslav strongman has denounced the imposition of a lawyer as a restriction of his right to mount his own defence.
Milosevic faces more than 60 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly masterminding the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s and the Serb crackdown on Kosovo in 1998-99.
He has also been charged with genocide and complicity in genocide, the gravest of war crimes, for the war in Bosnia that left 200,000 people dead.